Stephen Fry's Moustache ...

... or a darn-sight more than the average number of legs.

A Blatant Attempt to Bump Up the Hits

 There has been a distinct lack of cod philosophy here in the sparse postings that I've been making over the last year. I'm wondering if this is any indication of some cerebral deterioration that comes with age - after all I have the reading glasses and the wisps of grey at the temples so perhaps this is the start of the ever-accelerating descent on the other side of the hill of age. Oh well - lets carry out some mind-muscle exercises to try and apply what remains of the brainy brake pads to this headlong rush.

But how to start? Perhaps a song about a popular if cultish quiz show - oh dear - been done already.

What about poetry - all poetryd out at the moment myself though I did find a second-hand copy of this at the weekend which I haven't actually opened yet as on purchase it immediately hid itself in the bottom of the general Saturday Shopping bags and then mysteriously re-appeared by the bed - how does that happen? Pixies? Elves? Super-cooperative spiders? I'm afraid that this rationalist has an irrational dislike of spiders. I'm not phobic as I can put my nose right up against a web outside but a nasty black and wiry specimen stationary in the bedroom or scuttling like a relay team all running the same leg at once will have me on a chair like a woman in a sixties sitcom. Put this up against my daughter who also hates spiders inside and yet insists on them being ejected without harm, and the result is chaos. Anyway we all know that unless you carry them away some distance they will be back inside before you've got your slippers back on. And all that guff about conkers keeping them out is nonsense apparently so the only chemical solution is industrial-strength beasty-beating stuff and that's just not The Green Way is it? Never mind - good bit of frog and fost and they'll be rolling over in their thousands - little black husks everywhere - Arachnid Armageddon - Eight-Legged carnage.

Well that wasn't quite as philosophical as I was hoping. I've just changed my Army-and-Navy sweet supplier so it maybe something to do with that I suppose, though I don't think they've actually had Chloroform in them since our experiment in the prep room at school. Which reminds me that I have just discovered that school children are no longer allowed to dissect anything more complex than a chicken leg. Living in the country we had all sorts of roadkill and farming detritus supplied to our biology teacher who liked to boil the flesh off the mutilated remains and wire up the skeletons. His joy at discovering a massive tapeworm in a fresh rabbit was disconcerting but I'm sure said tapeworm still sits in a small jar of Formaldehyde on a shelf in the Portakabin which was our biology room along with the crouching remains of its unknowing host. What fun remains in biology if there is no longer the chance of more-sensitive scholars fainting? Maybe we should start some home dissection clubs. They can't touch you for it you know.

Frasmotic Compunctuousness and Gertrude Stein

Did you like yesterday's poem? I'm not sure I do. It was an exercise in the observation of a small moment of time but I think it didn't stick rigidly to the speed at which it started and accelerated through to get the end out of the way much earlier than it should have. However, lunchtime poems are time-limited anyway and you wouldn't want a poetic equivalent of The Mezzanine would you? My wife has complained that I use the word 'symmetry' in every third poem so I did a search through all 217 pages of poems that I have stored up and found only one instance. I do know that there is at least one word which I do overuse but I can't work out what it is, even using a frequency counter. It certainly wasn't contrafibularities.

Which reminds me that Richard Curtis is reportedly going to write an episode of Doctor Who. We shall see - Stephen Fry was supposed to be writing one but he is probably behind with The Dambusters so I don't hold out much hope. Maybe he isn't after all. Long entry tomorrow perhaps so I need to think about it.